The sale was part of a movement called Land Back, which sees ownership of lands return to tribes for the sake of effective stewardship.
"In Northern California, a Native American tribe is celebrating the return of ancestral lands in one of the largest such transfers in the nation’s history.
Through a Dept. of the Interior initiative aiming to bring indigenous knowledge back into land management, 76 square miles east of the central stretch of the Klamath River has been returned to the Yurok tribe.
Sandwiched between the newly-freed Klamath and forested hillsides of evergreens, redwoods, and cottonwoods, Blue Creek is considered the crown jewel of these lands, though if it were a jewel it wouldn’t be blue, it would be a giant colorless diamond, such is the clarity of the water.
Pictured: Blue Creek
It’s the most important cold-water tributary of the Klamath River, and critical habitat for coho and Chinook salmon. Fished and hunted on since time immemorial by the Yurok and their ancestors, the land was taken from them during the gold rush before eventually being bought by timber companies.
Barry McCovey Jr., director of the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department, remembers slipping past gates and dodging security along Blue Creek just to fish up a steelhead, one of three game fish that populate the river and need it to spawn.
Profiled along with the efforts of his tribe to secure the land for themselves and their posterity, he spoke to AP about the experience of seeing plans, made a decade ago, come to fruition, and returning to the creek on which he formerly trespassed as a land and fisheries manager.
“To go from when I was a kid and 20 years ago even, from being afraid to go out there to having it be back in tribal hands … is incredible,” he said.
Part of the agreement is that the Yurok Tribe would manage the land to a state of maximum health and resilience, and for that the tribe has big plans, including restoring native prairie, using fire to control understory growth, removing invasive species, restoring native fish habitat, and undoing decades of land-use changes from the logging industry in the form of culverts and logging roads.
“And maybe all that’s not going to be done in my lifetime,” said McCovey. “But that’s fine, because I’m not doing this for myself.”
The Yurok Tribe were recently at the center of the nation’s largest dam removal, a two decades-long campaign to remove a series of four hydroelectric dams along the Klamath River. Once the West Coast’s third-largest salmon run, the Klamath dams substantially reduced salmon activity.
Completed last September, the before and after photographs are stunning to witness. By late November, salmon had already returned far upriver to spawn, proving that instinctual information had remained intact even after a century of disconnect.
Pictured; Klamath River flows freely, after Copco-2 dam was removed in California
“Seeing salmon spawning above the former dams fills my heart,” said Joseph L. James, chairman of the Yurok Tribe, the leaders of the dam removal campaign along with the Karuk and Klamath tribes.
“Our salmon are coming home. Klamath Basin tribes fought for decades to make this day a reality because our future generations deserve to inherit a healthier river from the headwaters to the sea.”
Last March, GNN reported that the Yurok Tribe had also become the first of America’s tribal nations to co-manage land with the National Park Service under a historic memorandum of understanding involving Redwoods National Park.
The nonprofit Save the Redwoods bought a piece of land adjacent to the park, which receives 1 million visitors annually and is a UNESCO Natural Heritage Site, and handed it over to the Yurok for stewardship.
The piece of land, which contained giant redwoods, recovered to such an extent that the NPS has incorporated it into the Redwoods trail network, and the two agencies will cooperate in ensuring mutual flourishing between two properties and one ecosystem.
Back at Blue Creek, AP reports that work has already begun clearing non-native conifer trees planted for lumber. The trunks will be used to create log jams in the creek for wildlife habitat.
Costing $56 million, the land was bought from the loggers by Western Rivers Conservancy, using a mixture of fundraising efforts including private capital, low interest loans, tax credits, public grants and carbon credit sales.
The sale was part of a movement called Land Back, which involves returning ownership of once-native lands of great importance to tribes for the sake of effective stewardship. [Note: This is a weirdly limited definition of Land Back. Land Back means RETURN STOLEN LAND, PERIOD.] Studies have shown around the tropics that indigenous-owned lands in protected areas have higher forest integrity and biodiversity than those owned by national governments.
Land Back has seen 4,700 square miles—equivalent to one and a half-times the size of Yellowstone National Park—returned to tribes through land buy-back agreements in 15 states." [Note: Since land buyback agreements aren't the only form of Land Back, the total is probably (hopefully) more than that.]
*goes to Coachella in a white linen suit like an antebellum lawyer, sweating profusely and dabbing at my forehead with a handkerchief* now, I’m no fancy scientist, but would you folk know where a simple gentleman such as myself could obtain some acid? Now, I’m no big city lawyer, but could any of you fine youths point a country boy such as myself in the direction of some fucking acid?
”I have this artistic idea but not the skills to achieve it to the standard I want.”
congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!
Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?
Don’t let the fear of it not being perfect on the first try stop you from being Weird About It!
Please view Hokusai's gradual working towards The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, over a period of 39 years.
An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.
A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.
This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.
And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!
Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.
And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.
It's all there; Mt Fuji, the ocean, the wave. The boats are gone, but replaced with birds, flying with the wave instead of fighting against it. It's not as famous as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, but that's not what motifs are for -- each successive work does not have to surpass the previous in terms of success, especially in terms of external success. They're there for you to keep playing with, keep remixing and re-experiencing, for as long as you think you have something to say.
the funniest part of this post to me is that the reblog:like ratio is nearly 1:1. nobody’s just liking everyone who sees this video goes yeah i gotta inflict it on as many people as possible
“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.
I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.
And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.
discoholicmusic
gracieabrams
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
andulkaphoto
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
gamechangershow
